At intersections
people gather
to await the light
The pauses
are ours
and each signal
releases us
in choreography
like tides
the flow of bodies
like tides
if we could set them
to obey moons
of our own
invention.
Every so often I give an assignment I later regret.
Two weeks ago, after my history class read a little of Machiavelli’s The Prince, I asked them to apply what they had learned to a real life situation they knew well. They were to assess one of their teachers as a “prince”—changing his or her name, of course—and to ask the bigger questions, “Did following or violating Machiavelli’s edicts contribute to this teacher/prince’s effectiveness as a classroom leader? Was Machiavelli right?”
The overwhelming majority of the essays described teachers who would rather be feared than loved, who moved students with force instead of trust, who sought to give the impression of virtue but enforced values they did not themselves follow…and who—almost without exception—were great teachers.
I’m sorry I asked.
Sorry, not just because I am NOT one of those my-way-or-highway teachers but because I can’t help taking my students’ perspective seriously. They know—perhaps better than any graduate student in education—what works.
Some of the essays described teachers who gave detentions for every tardy. Some describe which teachers received late or make-up work first (because other teachers would forgive you everything). Some talked about harrowing encounters with teachers who forced them to do more work than they thought possible or teachers who, in situations where they might be expected to bend, didn’t.
Don’t misunderstand me, my students did not say they liked these teachers, but they did find them effective. These princes of academia didn’t care about being liked—and the end truly justified the means.
Me, I like to be liked. Oh, I understand my kindness has to have an edge and that, as Machiavelli pointed out, too much mercy is in the long run no mercy at all. My tests and assignments are challenging, and I read student work closely. Yet I’ve always thought curiosity a better motivator than compulsion and believed a little forgiveness a sign of faith in a student, a confidence in his or her character. Though I’ve been burnt plenty of times, most students—it seems to me—fulfill the promise you ascribe to them. I try not to trick them or scare them into good work. I try to model an intrinsic interest in learning instead. I want to elicit the labor only loving a task calls forth.
Those essays, however, made me feel like the hole in the fence they’ll always climb through.
By the seventh or eighth essay, I was looking for rationalizations. I told myself they’d remember my lessons longer because they wanted to remember them…and not just to pass the next impossible and terrifying test. I told myself that anything they did to appease me was probably not something they did for themselves and—as their desire to learn is the real object of their education—that’s as it should be. I told myself I had to live the codes of fairness and tolerance I ask them to live by and couldn’t ask them to be more perfect than I could ever be.
And I came close to believing I wasn’t rationalizing at all.
Then I picked up another essay. It concluded with the observation that students recognized the advantage in convincing teachers they liked their subjects. Doing so usually meant relaxed attention to homework and less work in general. The best teachers, the essay said, know few students really love school and don’t trust brown-nosing. They make their students do the work.
I winced—am I living a self-serving fiction transparent to everyone but me? You know the movie cliché…a room of people in oddly-angled too-close close-ups pointing and laughing.
For a couple of days after returning the essays, I stared warily into students’ faces searching for insincerity and listened for laughter that was a little too loud or long. And for a couple of days, I imagined I saw and heard what I was looking for.
Then a student I haven’t taught for a couple of years stopped by to see me. He’d just read a book on his own, and friends told him I’d just taught it. He wanted to talk, to hear what I thought, and, after thirty minutes of questions and digressions, he said “Thanks,” and left.
And that was enough of an antidote. I picked up another set of essays to look for new discoveries. I won’t forget my Prince assignment for a while. Machiavelli could be right about princes, and teachers. Yet, as long as I can’t know for sure, I guess I will have to go on living as if he’s wrong.
The surging train sound,
sturdy heels on the sidewalk.
After distant hours,
the world turns its head,
or its ears. Someone has moved
the taciturn dawn
to become Sunday.
The air stirs budding branches.
A square of sunlight
falls between buildings.
A window opens nearby.
Below, two people
laugh. A bird marks seconds with
its usual song.
*After Pierre Reverdy
Genghis Khan felt his least dream issued stratagems, and so he gathered counselors around him each twilight to read the twitching of his eyes beneath their lids. It grew dark quickly and, soon, the counselors slept.
Every night, the youngest of them gave himself to sleep instantly, eager for his own dreams. He might roam over the steppe on a stunted pony, dragging his feet, or he might fly on just one arm, the other hand at his lips to silence his wonder.
One night, he awoke in a dream as he might to day. Walking to the tent flap as if it were real, he pulled it aside and found the camp empty of soldiers. It was afternoon. The day was hot, the land unshadowed, but the wind seemed to have arrived over a glacier. Despite the sun, the air raised goose bumps.
Senses usually eluded him in dreams. They were impossible to gather in a single impression, but this camp appeared outside his mind. Each object so clear it vibrated, he walked as in a map where everything shouted a label that became the thing itself—the charred wood of dead fires looked black enough to absorb all light, the sky so blue it became solid, the yellow grass stiff as swords.
And, for a while, he enjoyed it alone. Up ahead though, he saw someone sitting on a log in the space where tents thinned. The man was smoking a pipe, and, by the tilt of his chin, the young counselor knew him instantly.
He thought of turning and walking away but he’d been seen. The arm of the man beckoned him. The young counselor’s feet broke into a trot beneath him.
“You’ve found me,” the man said.
“Yes, sire.”
“The others have not.”
“Yes, sire.”
“You may sit, boy. I won’t raise my eyes to you.”
Even in a dream, the counselor’s body fell onto one knee, and he averted his eyes.
“You know why you are here.”
“No, sire.”
“Scratch my back.” He shrugged and hunched to move his back beneath the boy’s fingers. His face relaxed. He moaned with pleasure.
“You will listen. When I ask you whether or not to act, you must tell me ‘no.’ To my every question, your answer must be ‘no.’ Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Yes…” he twisted his head to look at the boy and smiled, “you know what I ask and say ‘yes,’ but I hear you say ‘no’ even now,” he waved his hand and frowned, “That’s fine. Good. You may go.”
But the young counselor didn’t move. “How can I go when you told me…”
The answer, a burst of laughter, startled him.
“I knew your father better than you remember. When he brought you to be a soldier, he warned me, ‘Don’t let him have his own mind, or he will never listen,’ but I spared you battles. I didn’t want another man who listened, or only one who listens as my horse listens or as the tree listens for storms.” He chuckled, “You will understand the word means less than nothing. That is why you will say ‘no.’”
He held the young counselor’s eyes again, and said, “Now go. You may go. I must have a quiet pipe…because I can never have a quiet pipe.”
When the young counselor jerked awake he found himself at the Khan’s foot. All around him the other counselors had melted into sleeping forms. They leaned in such different directions that no one wind could have arranged them so. The faint sawing of their breath matched the noise of insects eating outside the tent.
Only one other set of eyes was open.
“Boy, you’re awake. The others have given in. Have you heard anything? Did I speak? Has my spirit shouted?”
“No, sire,” the boy said.
You’re not doing well. The mirror dims, and more objects are extinct to light. You think what fades here blazes elsewhere, furnishing another world’s illumination.
This avenue of shadows falls from the overhanging brows of teachers you’ve forgotten. Their motion has stilled to the palsy of atoms. Having mislaid the names of gods they inherited, they cast prayers without direction, and miss you. Their hearts are artifacts under moss, arteries and veins dried to wires that—uncovered—are intention without meaning and—buried—are the engine of your mind.
In my dream, they lead you someplace unlearned. Follow the road the wind makes, blind and groping. Losing your way may yet lead you home.
The three paragraphs above are my first prose poem.
Of the prose poem, Peter Johnson said, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”
I’m teaching an independent study this semester that swings between prose and poetry, often resting in the strange region between—microfiction and prose poetry. I’d read so little of this work before that I could not name any prose poets beyond Baudelaire and, of his work, I’d only read what everyone has.
Reading about the form for this independent study, however, I’ve run into essays that place the psalms, the whole of the King James Bible and Wordsworth beneath its banner. And poets I’ve always admired, like Russell Edson and Charles Simic (whose work I’d always seen as dividing into lines) appear under “prose poets.”
I wonder what the form could be if you can’t know it even if you see it.
So I looked in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which claims the form arrived as backlash to French neoclassicists who created rules to differentiate poetry from prose. Baudelaire called his work “prickings of the unconscious” and, though the Encyclopedia says the form is appropriate to “An extraordinary range of perception and expression,” most of what I’ve encountered seems surreal.
The stringiness of prose poetry makes it tangle like spaghetti uncut by the knife of lineation.
I also learned that, though people credit Baudelaire with creating the form, he credits Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit, published in 1842. Gaspard arrives in bursts of imagery, offering glancing angles on a Dutch town. A dwarf named Scarbo wanders through like a Hieronymous Bosch character still half-submerged in a dream.
None of this information, however, helped. Having traveled through some prose poetry (and some essays about it) and figuring the best way to know anything may be inside out, I had to give the form a try. Here is what I learned:
1. Prose poetry won’t liberate you from any poetic verity—you still edit, compress, and rest on imagery instead of exposition. The only liberation—where to divide lines—brings restlessness.
2. Despite what you might think, the prose part of the poetry is more dangerous than the poetry, giving suffocating logic to what, in poetry, might be blissfully and acceptably disjointed.
3. If poetry is a dream on film, prose poetry is the half-remembered moment before sleep that engendered the dream, the mind’s struggle to organize the absurd instead of the stylized effort to render the absurd as art.
4. Prose poetry is harder—and more interesting—than I thought.
He thought just one day
he might speak—eyes on eyes—and
not notice her by
looking away. She
surfaced as from ink, dark’s grip
still clinging. Her lips
moved to shape words and
found machines stringing random
beads, a rosary
of the damned. Neither
spoke in tongues they knew—stopping
was all either had
to say. I passed pretending
not to pause or see.
At the end of her memoir Black Ice, Lorene Carey recalls sitting through commencement and awards as one of the first African-American graduates of St. Paul’s and wondering whether she would receive an award, whether she would do any more than simply graduate.
She feels a “greedy girl” roiling inside her and silently asks when she will get her due, when she will receive the credit she’s absolutely certain she deserves.
I applaud her courage because, though I’ve felt exactly what she did during that moment, it’s hard for me to confess it. I tell myself doing matters and getting credit doesn’t, but I can never entirely convince myself. At some point, a voice squeaks out, “What about me? What about all I’ve done? Where’s my award?”
I’ve written enough about reconciling ambition and humility and wish I could be done with it. I’d love nothing more than to wake up tomorrow in a Buddha state, done with striving and content with being.
In my fantasy, I picture myself as Spock from Star Trek. Baited by Bones and prodded to argue with being insulted, I say, “You proceed from a false assumption. I have no ego to bruise.”
Humility is my highest value and my cruelest master. When you interact and work with people you like and admire who feel no misgivings about arguing for their due, their advantage, their talents and skills, you can’t help feeling something must be wrong with you.
Biologically, an organism has to desire not just survival but success, but my greedy guy is a continual torture. “Stand up for yourself!” the inner voice cries, “don’t be a pushover, don’t let anyone take you for granted!” “I’m deserving!” it screams. I can’t help listening sometimes—I know some people would say I should listen always—but I wish I could have my ego excised.
We’ve been studying the Italian Renaissance in my history class lately, and one of our texts makes much of artists signing their work. It attributes technical leaps to individualism and the advent of artistic celebrity. It’s true we work hardest for ourselves, and outdoing others must have contributed considerably to the innovative and revolutionary beauty these artists created. Still, I’d rather believe they loved each other’s work too, celebrated each other’s efforts, and reveled in painting and sculpting more than in making names for themselves.
I’m delusional, I know. I wish I could be happy simply creating, doing my job as best I can, trying to be the person I’d like to be…without wanting to be acknowledged, lauded… thanked even.
I suppose, however, that’s impossible. “One may understand the cosmos,” G. K. Chesterton said, “but never the ego.”
Afternoon dwindles:
the sky gathers birds flying
to some unseen rest,
the evening sun
amasses on surfaces
like condensation,
as if the inner
light of objects collected
like dew. A life so
infused—remembered,
revealed—would drown desire
at last. It can’t last—
doors open to love’s return,
the body of night.
Slang sometimes splits the world in two.
Take “cool.” As subjective, shifty, and contextual as “cool” is, nearly everything is or isn’t IT. A sort of Heisenburg uncertainty principle of language governs the word—the first stage of becoming “uncool” is being identified as “cool.” Nothing stays cool for long. When something falls under that descriptor, however, it is solidly cool. What in this world is “nearly cool” or “barely cool enough”? “Cool” is a cool word, not just an adjective, but a phenomenon.
Over the last few years, however, another slang word has developed the same sort of power, “awkward.” And I’m not so happy about it. By the dictionary “awkward” means “difficult to deal with” or “lacking grace or ease,” but, as it’s used, its meaning is mercurial.
The students I teach frequently evoke the word. “Awkward!” they say in that roller-coaster dropping voice, as if they’ve just spied something—a toucan or a model T or a man dressed as an anvil—that simply must be pointed out. What they are referencing isn’t always as clear. I want to ask, “What was awkward about that?” but doing so would be,…well, you know.
“Awkward,” like “cool,” seems easier to apply than explain. Users know it when they see it—even if they’d be hopeless to explain what “it” is. Sometimes “awkward” seems little different from “ouch” or “uh oh,” or any other brute exclamation responding to hidden causes. In a moment of social tension, after a subtle or not so subtle misstep in a public or semi-public dance, a general queasy discomfort arises, and someone labels the moment “awkward.”
I don’t much like the word. Besides being overused, it’s often a desperate declaration, an attempt to make something innocuous into something significant. Nothing adds to an awkward silence like saying “awkward silence.” Nothing makes you feel more awkward than eliciting the word.
And don’t even get me started on the awkward turtle phenomenon.
The trouble with “awkward” and “cool” is that each has a reductive meaning. When, by definition, something is or isn’t—black or white—discussing it becomes nearly impossible. Some people wince when they hear “pretty unique” because things are or aren’t unique, but can uniqueness have degrees, can a thing be unique in some respects and not others? Doesn’t nearly everything have degrees?
Though “cool” neatly divides the world, at least it’s generally complimentary, positive. “That’s cool,” declares support or approval. Whatever cultural damage the marketing of cool has done, its colloquial use is largely benign.
“Awkward,” however, illuminates social blunders, pointing out what the awkward offenders don’t need pointing out. I wonder if being cited as awkward makes a person more or less so. I suspect it just makes them circumspect, compliant, less free or expressive. The best way to avoid the word, it seems to me, is to avoid speaking altogether. Take no risks and you will never be awkward.
Yet, here’s a really radical thought—what’s wrong with awkwardness? It might be awkward to talk about how you feel, but it’s sometimes necessary. It may be awkward to raise an objection or say what everyone is thinking but no one will say, yet I’m often grateful when people do.
I’m worried about a world where we avoid discomfort, where creating or experiencing discomfort causes censure.
These sentiments probably mark me as out of touch, a cranky old dude who takes words much too seriously. I can appreciate that perspective, and I’m not naïve. No crusade or blog post will eradicate “awkward” from our speech. The genie is over the dam, the water is out of the bottle, and something is probably under the bridge.
But I can’t stay quiet just to go along, even though identifying myself as an old fogey is a little…you know.
In the last village,
each day sees one birth, one death.
One citizen counts,
awaiting his day
marking tallies on a wall
at the edge of town.
Only he stares out
into bare plains, eyes searching
for dust not raised by
twisting wind or hope.
When he dozes, dreams visit,
hearts of suns beating
in the black heavens, much too
numerous to count.
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